Minne Inno's first all-virtual Inno on Fire event was a success, even though the winners didn't get to walk home with the red blazer jackets they receive as prizes.
The event, which recognizes Minnesota's startups, was held on Thursday. It was the end of a months-long process following the initial announcement of 39 Inno on Fire honorees, announced in March.
Judges select Blazer winners from that earlier crowd. We picked one Blazer winner from each of our seven original categories and added an eighth: Crisis Innovators, or startups who pivoted to tackle the Covid-19 crisis head on. All three of our Crisis Innovators were Blazer winners.
The Blazer winners are:
- Startup of the Year: 75F
- Women-led Startup of the Year: Abilitech Medical
- Early-Stage Startup: Vemos
- Growth-Stage Startup: Civic Eagle
- Community Builder: Launch Minnesota
- Social Impact: Finnovation Lab
- Opportunity Challenge: Lunar Startups
- Crisis Innovators: RoundtableRX, Big Wheelbarrow and Geneticure.
Watch a video featuring all of the Inno on Fire winners below.
After the announcement the Blazer winners, a panel of some of the winners had a wide-ranging conversation about the Twin Cities. The Blazer panel featured Damola Ogundipe, the CEO of Civic Eagle; Danielle Steer, the managing director of Lunar Startups; and Dave Koerner, the vice president of global marketing for 75F.
The panel discussed how Covid-19 had affected their businesses. Lunar Startups, an incubator for businesses founded by women and people of color, had to pivot to an all-virtual startup cohort, something they weren't prepared for. However, that adversity might have helped Lunar's companies in the long-run.
"It goes back to this idea that resilient people build resilient companies. When you are coming from an environment where maybe things haven't been easy or you've really had to fight for the win... it makes it so that in times of crisis you are able to thrive and survive in ways that maybe other people might not," she said.
The conversation also turned to issues of social justice, including the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this summer and the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisc.
While the startup community responded loudly after Floyd's death, Ogundipe said he wasn't impressed.
"I will not be optimistic until I see people actually taking action and not just writing statements," he said.
Those actions, the panel agreed, should consist at least in part of hiring and wiring, or hiring a diverse staff and investing in diverse founders.
But there are certain disparities that the startup community can't fix on its own. Koerner talked about a 75F sales rep who was racially profiled by the police in Texas while visiting a customer. The sales rep was pulled from their car at gunpoint, he said, and 75F had to contact the ACLU. It brings the threat of racism close to home, Koerner said.
"On top of the coronavirus, to have to worry about that... that just speaks to the extraordinary difficulty that our staff and employees [of color] face today," he said.
But Minnesota is also a unique environment, and one in which startups stick up for other startups. Steer volunteered herself and some of Lunar Startup's cohort companies as resources for companies who want to invest or reinvest on diversity and inclusion, while Koerner said that 75F was looking at ways to open up its office in Bloomington to small startups that need space.
Ogundipe said that while Minneapolis doesn't offer some of the opportunities that San Francisco or Boston might, its size means that any one person can have an impact. "It's kind of like the perfect size of a city, right? You can actually make a difference. You can put your fingerprints on Minnesota," he said.
View the full Inno on Fire video below.
